Valuable cars cause way too much anxiety. To learn to wrench and have more fun, I need a great car that’s also a piece of garbage.
It was hard to accept that this hobby, the one that has given me an amazing career and more adventures than a 24-year-old could normally dream of, is also one of my biggest sources of anxiety. I’m budget-limited, exclusively interested in cars that everyone knows are great, incompetent with a wrench, and prone to care deeply about the cars I own. It’s those last two that are a problem, as caring about the value and condition of a car that you don’t know how to fix is an expensive habit. So I bought a broken E30 in terrible condition, and I’m excited to say that I don’t care about it.
In the past, I haven’t had the luxury to not care. When you tie up money in a clean Boxster or a driver E39 M5, you have to care. The car’s value is tied not only to its driving characteristics but its paint, its extraneous electronics, and its interior. When it breaks, even if it’s something that doesn’t matter, you either fix it or you lose the money when you sell it. Either way, the car has a capacity to bleed you dry all in the name of preserving something for the next guy.
If you have (1) the budget for an ideal example or (2) you’re skilled with a wrench, you can get around those issues. But for the cars I want, number one isn’t usually true and number two never is. Since I’m worried about the value, too, it’s hard to talk myself into learning wrenching on the fly. As ridiculous as it sounds, I dread the one unfastened bolt or forgotten step that costs me thousand dollars and the shame of being even more incompetent than I expected.
These barriers, they’re not real so much as they are constructions in my head. I could just learn on the valuable car I already own, the LX470, or stop worrying entirely and pay the tax of driving great cars and making others fix them. But anxiety isn’t logical, it’s an endless series of what-ifs that always somehow ends up with me humiliated or broke. The fear of everything breaking is so detrimental to my future as a car enthusiast that, I’ve realized, the only way out is through.
So I bought a car where almost all of it is broken. A 1987 E30 BMW 325i with an LSD, originally painted bronze but now barely painted. On my test drive, I noticed that the odometer had stopped at 231,000, the tach either stuck, lagged, or moved backwards, the oil light was on, the coolant light was on, there was a weird air leak sound, the clutch sometimes required a bit of time to engage right, the sunroof didn’t work, the radio was in anti-theft mode with no code to be found, the passenger window didn’t work, the ventilation only worked on its highest setting, one battery terminal disconnected during the drive, the A/C didn’t work, a bunch of lights were out, the on-board computer thought it was -30 degrees outside, the brakes would need to be replaced, the mismatched tires were each around nine years old, and the rear shocks were blown.
I didn’t care. Because it was a clean (Was it? – Ed.) E30 with a sweetheart motor, an LSD, and a body that had spent its whole life in California. The steering was still talkative, the car still effortlessly balanced, and the engine still eager to rush to its redline. The rest is all details.
More importantly, there’s nothing to be anxious about. Damned near everything that can go wrong already has, and the car’s still great. The worn interior and long-faded paint only adds to its nothing-but-the-essentials vibe, and confirms that I’ll never spend a moment caring about scratches, dings, or dirt. And if the engine blows tomorrow, it won’t matter, because I can drop in a K20, drive it for a year, and still come out without losing my pants.
Assuming it holds, though, I finally have a car that I can learn to wrench on. There’s nothing else to break and no easier car to work on. And whatever I put into it, I truly don’t care if I get it back out. That’s not what this car is about. It’s about the joy of driving, and how much easier it is to access when you strip the ego, anxiety, and nonsense away.
Keyword: I Bought a Barely Working E30 Because I'm Sick of Caring About Cars